


the blossom knows

by buttface



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Domestic, Existential Crisis, Gardens & Gardening, Getting Together, God has not read the agile manifesto and it shows, Introspection, M/M, Post-Almost Apocalypse (Good Omens), South Downs Cottage (Good Omens), only a little bit of bitterness about brexit, parentheticals, speculative angelology, talking at god
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-19 19:45:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19363126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttface/pseuds/buttface
Summary: In the beginning, there was a garden. And after the end, there was a garden.What do you do when you are no longer wanted for what you were created to do? What is an angel who's no longer at home in Heaven?





	the blossom knows

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lemedy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemedy/gifts).



> Lemedy! I wanted to make you a gift to distract from work stress and because I owe you big time for driving me to watch Good Omens instead of just assuming I'd hate it like I hate every adaptation. I definitely do not hate it. You wanted more cottage, I have brought you cottage.
> 
> Canon is more or less TV, tinged by book memories, backfilled with a bunch of stuff I made up about angels (which is itself probably messed up by all the Granblue Fantasy I've been playing).
> 
> There is a brief allusion to the existence of homophobia, but none actually manifests.
> 
> Title is Queen, of course, from "Teo Torriatte (Let Us Cling Together)".
> 
> (I fucked up some perfectly good fluff is what I did, look at it, it's got anxiety)

In the beginning, there was a garden.

This is a lie, of course. Crowley is achingly aware the garden wasn't the beginning. He was there then, hanging stars in the firmament with delicate hands that were never made for sin. It was good work. He loved it. Kindling fires in the vast darkness, tending them until they could burn on their own, in turn making more of the building blocks of creation. And when their ancient lives reached their end, he would be there again, unchanged, to tell them how proud he was. 

It’s solitary work, but angels weren’t really designed to desire company. When the power of the Heavenly Host flows through you to carry out God’s bidding, what need is there for your companions to be physically present? An angel is never alone; an angel is a joyful part of something greater.

(He hadn't ever planned to get involved with the human project. It had seemed too fiddly, too much in need of intervention. Give him the slow, self-sustaining burn of a nebula any day. No roots to water, no sins to judge. But God prioritizes in mysterious ways.)

That was someone different, though. Crowley doesn't know them anymore. He feels the absence of them every day, the ghost of their ethereal wingtips brushing skin they never had and the sense-memory of starstuff in fingers-that-are-not-these-fingers, but that doesn’t mean they’re the same. It’s easy to remember things that aren’t true, even for the limited imaginations of angels. For a demon, untruths come as easily as not breathing.

So then: in the beginning, there was a garden. And after the end, there was a garden.

*

Crowley had been the one to suggest it.

He was usually the one to suggest things. He was rarely the one who _successfully_ suggested things, but it is said (though not by Crowley) that God loves a trier. 

There were two arguments he presented in favor of the cottage:

  1. If they're to be their own side now, they need a base that isn't compromised. Heaven and Hell seem content to give them a wide berth for now, but immortal beings are particularly good at holding a grudge. And if either side does come knocking, they’re going to be better armed than usual. Better to already have a stronghold in place if one or both of them needs to get out of town on a short notice.
  2. Being in the English countryside seems to have been a good influence on the antichrist, though Crowley can't imagine why. He’s been out there, mostly when he needs to get some low-effort sin-enabling done to meet quotas, and it certainly doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone _else_ from wanting to burn everything to the ground in service of someone with questionable ambitions. Clearly it would be in their best interests to understand what part that environment played in the most important supernatural non-event in millennia.



These were both entirely reasonable arguments and Aziraphale agreed readily. They were also both absolute codswallop.

It is generally accepted that there is a difference between lying and simply deliberately failing to state relevant but inconvenient truths. This is false, but convenient for all involved. Heaven doesn’t have time for prosecuting the difference between deliberate withholding of information and genuinely not thinking of it, and Hell would much prefer people really commit to lying.

Despite what Aziraphale may think, Crowley has never been inclined to lie to him. There are, however, quite a few things that he has chosen not to mention which Aziraphale might find quite salient.

Crowley’s actual reasons:

  1. Crowley had grown quite fond of spending time with Aziraphale and wanted to do more of it. Not so long ago “more” would have been “more than once a year”, but conspiring to avert the apocalypse had spoiled him. If they lived together, even for a little while, Crowley would stop having to come up with excuses to go for dinner together.
  2. Crowley now knew what it felt like to be on the earth with no sense of Aziraphale's presence and the taste of everything he had loved burning on his tongue. Every time he had to leave the bookshop and go back to his own flat alone, he remembered walking out the door with the fire raging behind him. The fact that he had completely misunderstood the situation and Aziraphale hadn’t actually been erased from existence in hellfire did nothing to lessen the knowledge of how it would feel if he had.



Neither of these things would be much of a surprise to Aziraphale if he were reasonable. But if either of them were reasonable by ethereal standards, they’d probably be facing off in a vast metaphysical struggle right now instead of just bickering over decor. 

And so one day, not long after the world failed to end, Aziraphale locked the doors of the bookshop, put a sign in the window announcing it was closed for holidays (making it only slightly more closed than usual), and climbed tentatively into the Bentley.

They could have just miracled something into existence, but it would have attracted undesirable attention. The usual tweaking of personal economies go more or less unnoticed against the celestial background hum, but an entire house pulled from the ether could be tracked if anyone found cause to do so, and they are ostensibly trying to keep it a secret. Besides, Crowley enjoyed the excuse to go driving aimlessly around the countryside listening to all Aziraphale’s orchestral recordings gradually turning into “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”

Neither of them had really been sure what they were looking for; they’ve both seen quite a lot of the world, but not usually for real estate purposes. But one afternoon, driving down a pale dusty road through rolling hills while arguing amiably over which of them had actually been better at temptations when you get right down to it, Aziraphale suddenly gasped and motioned for Crowley to pull over. 

“I think we’re here,” he said, sniffing. “I can feel it.”

Crowley had been unable to feel anything out of the ordinary, but it was nice being closer to the sea for a change, and they’d just driven past a flock of small, round sheep with curly blond fleece that had privately reminded him of Aziraphale and this seemed as auspicious an omen as any.

(As it so happens, angels are so good at detecting love in a place that sometimes it’s not even necessary for the love to have happened there yet. Aziraphale had failed to attend the quarterly update with the presentation about this, however.)

The handy thing about Britain is that nobody thinks twice about there being a bit of land whose ownership is entirely undocumented and unresolvable. It had required very little work at all. A firm specializing in making quite a lot of money for people far away had taken a second look at an empty old cottage they were going to convert for short-term lets and discovered that actually, the paperwork wasn’t quite as clear as they thought and perhaps didn’t exist at all, and maybe they’d be better off looking somewhere else, or at another line of work entirely.

It’s a simple building. Rectangular, half-timbered, with an incongruous wooden front porch that would make a historical architect cry; Crowley had gotten the idea that houses in the countryside had porches and therefore now this one now did too. There’s only one bedroom, but since only one of them actually sleeps on a regular basis, this has yet to cause even a humorous misunderstanding. Aziraphale has brought enough of his books down to keep him busy when Crowley’s asleep, and if he’s noticed that Crowley rarely naps long enough anymore for him to even get through a single manuscript, he hasn’t mentioned it.

The masterpiece, though, is the garden.

Crowley had wanted to take the same approach to the garden as he had to his collection of captive greenery in London, but the first time Aziraphale had caught him shouting at the jasmine for climbing the trellis in the wrong direction the angel had looked so concerned that Crowley had to stop mid-tirade out of embarrassment. He’s since reluctantly come to accept that plants actually do okay when given access to real earth and sufficient water and the occasional sunlight not filtered through tinted glass, things they weren’t going to get much of in London with or without Crowley’s encouragement. 

It was probably at one point a carefully tended and controlled demonstration of some local noble’s taste and trade connections. That control has long been lost to history. Fully a third of it is a riot of rhododendron, gone feral after successfully choking out all other plants in the vicinity and reduced to turning on each other. The rest of it is an embarrassment of what Crowley thinks of as “tall green things”, “short green things”, “smelly green things”, “spiky green things”, “green climbing things”, and “non-green variations on previous.” 

Aziraphale loves it, though. He was the one who actually spent time in the Garden, after all. He has a knack for spotting the herb struggling in the shade of a scruffy ex-topiary or the skinny rampion trying to keep up with a showy rose, combined with the patience to spend days carefully pruning and tending until there’s a space for all of them.

Crowley mostly leaves him to it. Not his style, he drawls, even though Aziraphale has seen him thoughtfully stroking the spot on a leaf when he thinks nobody’s looking. He has only insisted on one addition.

“An apple tree,” Crowley beams, pulling the sapling from the backseat of the Bentley. “Brings back memories, eh angel?”

Aziraphale purses his lips. “Couldn’t we just get an apple and plant the seeds from it? Then we’d be able to eat a nice apple _now_.” 

“Can’t. Doesn’t work like that, you plant a seed from a nice apple and you get,” Crowley waves his hand vaguely as he circles, trying to find a nice-looking bit of empty soil. “You get the wrong apple, anyway.”

“You’ve been reading up about this.”

“Call it a professional interest. That’s just how apples are. You plant a seed and leave it alone, it’ll come out completely different. You’ve got to sort of craft a new tree as it grows by combining it with bits of other trees. Absurdly complicated. Wish I’d thought of it. Over here, do you think?”

*

Angels were created as servants of God. That’s the whole point of angels, really. Hang around Heaven, sing the names of God, help Creation along, whatever needs doing. Guide humanity, once they’re the flagship project. Pick up the slack for your old teammate who stopped turning up one day, whose once-holy name your tongue is no longer able to speak. Don’t worry about them. That’s not your responsibility. You were made for great, ineffable things; why would you be made to want anything else?

What’s the point of an angel without orders to follow? 

Aziraphale was never a particularly hard worker, of course. Letting a demon do your blessings for you so you don’t have to divert your attention from pursuit of a particularly juicy manuscript isn’t exactly Employee of the Millenium material. But there’s a difference between having a job that you are finding excuses not to do and not having a job that anyone wants you for anymore.

He knows, intellectually, that Heaven’s orders aren’t the same thing as God’s plan. Maybe he’s known for a long time, in his heart, otherwise he would have worked a little harder to carry them out. But there had to be _someone_ in charge who knew what they were doing, didn’t there, and it wasn’t his responsibility to worry about _how_ , exactly, drowning thousands of children was advancing righteousness in the world. It’s not supposed to make sense, that’s what faith is for.

Humans can grow and change, that’s one of the key features they have over angels. They need to be taught to grow in the right way, to make the right choices. Sometimes that teaching might seem cruel, but that’s the job, isn’t it? It must be the right thing to do, otherwise why would angels be doing it?

( _Weren't humans not supposed to know the difference between good and evil?_ Crowley teased him once. Aziraphale hasn't got an answer for that one. Perhaps the problem was that it wasn’t supposed to be as easy as eating an apple. Or perhaps they really had both done the other’s job, even then.)

Angels are already perfect and righteous when they’re created. There’s only one choice they _can_ make, and it’s rather a terminal one. In the face of creeping corruption and decay, the forces of Heaven must be steadfast and true. Any change would mean falling away from the original perfection of their true home in Heaven.

(Even the antichrist had a _choice_.)

He wonders again if this is how becoming, you know, _not-an-angel_ starts.

Heaven and Hell can banish them from Head Office and try to destroy their souls, but neither of them can make an angel Fall. Only God can do that. Aziraphale’s defiance would’ve been more than enough in the old days, but Crowley says he hasn’t heard of anybody Falling in at least the last thousand years. (Though Crowley also never spent much time in the office, and there could easily be plenty of new demons he’s just never met. It’s a risky conclusion to jump to.)

Maybe God has changed Her mind. 

(Aziraphale can think of a few other possible reasons why God hasn’t appeared to cast anyone into the pit in quite some time, but they don’t bear talking about. If you can’t tell the difference between a God who has learned kindness, a God who doesn’t care anymore, and a God who is long gone, do you really want to know the truth?)

*

Aziraphale had been fidgety the first time they went down the road into town to introduce themselves.

“It’s not like Soho, you know,” he’d said wistfully. “Humans can be _quite_ rude.”

Somewhere along the line, a number of humans had gotten the idea that two people of the same gender shouldn’t be romantically involved. This was something they’d come up with entirely on their own, but it was Heavenly policy to support humans creating and obeying rules as a general principle to make sure they didn’t lose the knack.

Angels don’t have gender, it being another of the new features introduced for the human project. Aziraphale, who as a principality was charged with knowing about this kind of thing, had tried to learn a bit about it at the drinks reception for the launch of humanity, but the virtues in development would only mutter about “scope creep” and “premature optimization” and “bit of a hack job really, but you try explaining the concept of a minimum viable product to _some_ dominations, honestly”. All he’d really learned was not to ask.

Humans, however, tend to be unreasonably dedicated to the idea that gender and sexuality are clear and well-delineated, despite all evidence.

Crowley had dabbled in various genders throughout the ages (everybody needs a hobby, especially immortals), but found masculinity currently went best with the aesthetic he was trying to cultivate. Aziraphale, having been strongly encouraged to pick one when he was issued his body, had chosen male as it seemed like the least effort and felt there were much better things to do with his time than form strong opinions about it. But both would accept that they were in a certain practical sense male, or close enough anyway.

This couldn’t cause them anywhere near as much trouble as the _real_ taboo of their relationship, but it did sometimes lead to very tedious and embarrassing conversations with humans.

“You can’t tell me you don’t love a good righteous argument, angel,” Crowley grinned, all teeth and glinting eyes behind the fresh sunglasses he’d selected for the occasion. “Besides, maybe nobody will think we’re anything besides very old friends.”

“ _Really_ , my dear,” Aziraphale had replied, and it was hard to argue with that.

It had been rather anticlimactic; yes, everyone had assumed they were married, and no, nobody had tried to start anything, which left Crowley without any catharsis for the butterflies sinking to the pit of his stomach when their waitress asked whether he’d like to order for his husband while Aziraphale had wandered off for a closer look at the homemade cakes in the glass case.

Neither of them asks the other how they feel about this for fear they might have the question turned back on them.

Often, though, they keep to themselves. There isn’t anything they _need_ to interact with humans for, not anymore. Nobody’s going to expect any memos on humans led astray or guided to holiness, and there’s no need to scramble at the last minute to make up the quotas. There’s just whatever it is they would do if they never had to do their jobs again. Whatever that is.

Aziraphale decides to learn to cook the human way, not least because he’s afraid that one day Heaven might work out how to revoke his access to miracles. The angel is a firm believer that one should always look on the bright side and hope for the best, but that it is also much easier to do that when you have a plan B in place. 

New plants start to appear in the garden, strays blown in by the wind now that there’s a little space. Aziraphale tends each of them, the weeds and herbs and ornamentals alike, because who is he to judge? Look at all the things he’s spent six thousand years willfully not understanding.

He even experiments with sleeping on the days when he’s not sure what to do with himself. It does feel nice when he gets it right. Sometimes he wakes to find Crowley asleep on the other side of the bed, curled up on himself under the crisp cotton sheets but with a clear and careful space left between them.

Every time, Aziraphale thinks of how he could reach out across the space and touch Crowley’s face, tuck his hair behind his ears, rest his hand in Crowley’s. He’s brushed Crowley’s fingers a few times over the years, by accident, and he knows they’re surprisingly cool to the touch, not at all like the hellfire he’d been taught. It’s likely Crowley would wake just enough to curl his own fingers into Aziraphale’s, or whisper “Angel…” in the fond voice that Aziraphale doesn’t know what to do with.

Knowing something doesn’t make it easy to act on it. He knows for certain now that all of Heaven doesn’t have the goodness and value in Crowley’s little finger, and he’d suspected it for a very long time before that. He knows that nothing they can do now can put either of them in any more danger than they’re already in. He knows that Crowley is waiting for him.

He also knows that he has spent six thousand years being very stupid, and it is not so easy to grow out of the habit of six thousand years.

He keeps busy. It _is_ nice, despite everything. He makes herb crusted chicken and lavender shortbread with what grows in the garden, and Crowley even eats some of it alongside his usual coffee and wine. Nothing feels quite the same as before, even when he does the same things, but he knows how close they came to never having shortbread or wine or gardens ever again and he doesn’t feel guilty, either. He doesn’t know what he feels.

Some days, Crowley disappears in the Bentley for hours, though Aziraphale can always sense him nearby. He always comes back full of stories. Crowley has embraced the opportunity to meddle with humans as a free agent now, without any need to account for his blessings or temptations to any authority other than the two of them. He has a particular fondness for rebellious children.

“How do you know you’re doing the right thing?” Aziraphale asks him once, when they’ve driven a few towns over to the closest place that does acceptable sushi and he’s feeling particularly soft.

“I don’t. Never have, really,” Crowley shrugs. “But they deserve a chance.”

 _We deserved a chance_.

*

It gets so dark at night out here; not the close, humid dim of Hell, but the deep, vast darkness of raw Creation. The stars are clear, bright pinpricks scattering the face of the sky. (He knows exactly what the stars really are, but they are also the closest he’s ever gotten to the face of God.) He hates it. Humans fill their cities with lights to chase away the dark and outshine the stars, but the cottage is too far away from anyone for that.

Crowley had become used to the press of humanity all around. At first, it was because that was the job; if you’re supposed to be tempting humans it’s certainly more convenient to have humans close at hand at all times. But he finds he likes to have them around, as infrequently as he actually talks to them. Like how humans enjoy a bit of birdsong in the morning. Humans make noise and light and tight pants and new phones and frame clusters and he quite likes it, thanks, because he had nothing to do with most of it. 

But the stars, when he can see them, he remembers. He is six thousand years old and he did not come here to _remember_.

Heaven isn’t above Earth, not in the way it is above Hell nor even in the way that the stars are above the ground. Even if it was, looking to Heaven isn’t the way to find God. (Though perhaps it is no less accurate than any other direction.) But the old habit from the Pit is hard to shake. When the earliest memory you have that you’re sure is yours is of falling, it’s only natural for the gaze to trace the path backwards.

Tonight he is in the garden, looking up, watching the stars not fall. 

“You tested them, God. Did you find out what you wanted to know? Could any result you got have made a difference?”

He stands with hands in his pockets, faux-casual, the impossible arc of his body curved to stare upwards. He does not expect an answer. He doesn’t _want_ an answer. What would an answer now mean after six thousand years of silence?

“Were the two of us really part of the plan all along? Or are you just making it up as you go along like the rest of us?”

The breeze that rustles his hair is spicy-floral with lavender and orchid and the promise of apple blossoms someday.

“It's not too late to change the Plan, you know. You never did set it in stone. Call off the angels. Let demons have a way back home. Anything you like. There's no shame. We'll all say it was so clever of you to have meant it that way all along.”

He waits, and waits, and nothing continues to happen.

“You're always welcome at our place.”

Aziraphale is quite prepared to say that he’d only opened the window to get some fresh air, it smells so lovely on these cool nights after the rain, don’t you think? He certainly hadn’t heard anything and definitely hadn’t wondered if it’s strange that between them it’s the demon who trusts God is listening. But Crowley doesn’t say anything about it when he comes back inside, just like every other time.

*

“I could have stayed out there, in the stars. I’d still be an angel.”

Crowley’s voice is soft and sudden in the warm twilight. Aziraphale is carefully pruning bushes by miracle-light while the demon sprawls across what was once a wooden sun lounger he bought at a car boot sale but through extended contact with Crowley’s imagination has become more of a sun throne.

“I’m sorry.” Aziraphale pauses. It doesn’t feel right, hearing the words come out of his own mouth. Crowley never speaks about _before_ and Aziraphale doesn’t know what to say. “Are you? Sorry, I mean.”

Unspoken: A Crowley who was an angel would be a Crowley that Aziraphale might never have met. Or if they had, it would likely be as two footsoldiers, cleansing the earth of the insufficiently righteous. (Or perhaps not. Aziraphale can’t imagine even that counterfactual Crowley going along with Heaven’s plan for war. He would have been there himself, though, he knows that.)

Crowley looks over at Aziraphale with half a smile as if he should already know the answer, and it isn’t fair.

“I’m glad, you know. That I’m here and not … Upstairs.” The angel pauses to flick a beetle off of his rosemary. “I would say that I’m glad you are too, but I’m not sure I have the right to be glad about that.”

Crowley makes a small, noncommittal noise. He fidgets on the chair, as if trying to find a comfortable position for wings that aren’t present on this plane. 

“They didn’t deserve you. Heaven or hell.” Aziraphale looks away from Crowley as he says it, so he can’t see the unspoken answer to the unspoken question _Do I?_ “You’re too brave.”

“I didn’t mean to be,” Crowley murmurs.

And like a revelation Aziraphale understands that he will never get to know if he’s doing the right thing. He will never again receive his missions in righteous flaming letters upon holy parchment, and he will also never again be asked to justify the unjustifiable. 

Crowley accepted that uncertainty a long time ago. Aziraphale always assumed his courage was just a fundamental difference between them, because there had to be fundamental differences between angels and demons, didn’t there? Otherwise it would all just be down to luck that Crowley had Fallen and he hadn’t, and that would hardly be fair. Then Crowley would have spent all these years feeling as alone as Aziraphale would have felt if it was him, and that would _certainly_ not be fair.

(It wasn’t fair.)

He owes it to Crowley to shoulder the burden of being the brave one sometimes, too.

There will be no great tapestries or ceiling frescoes made depicting the first embrace between an angel and a demon; it’s not really up to the usual dramatic standard, with Aziraphale’s pruning shears placed neatly beside the lounger and his body awkwardly leaned over Crowley’s as there’s no space to sit and Crowley’s sunglasses knocked askew only half hiding the red rims of his golden eyes. But Crowley sighs into his ear and pulls Aziraphale half onto his lap so he can hold his angel more closely, and they may be far from the stark beauty of heaven but Aziraphale feels more right than he ever has.

The Aziraphale of six thousand years ago could not have loved Crowley like this. Perhaps even the Aziraphale from eleven years ago could not have loved Crowley like this. The Crowley who had hung the stars would not have laughed wetly into his hair and murmured “angel, angel” as though the entire Heavenly Host were only shallow copies of the fussy bookseller in his arms.

They have _changed_ , become more than what they were made to be, more than the worst things that happened to them, and it is glory in the highest. They are making something new, of themselves and of each other. They are nowhere near done with the work, but they have time.

“Let me show you the stars,” Crowley offers, as if it’s a favor he’s asking of Aziraphale. ”Only a visit. The garden can thrive on its own for a bit. Maybe there’ll be apples when we get home.”

“Home,” Aziraphale echoes, eyes darting up to meet Crowley’s but the sight is unbearably bright and he has to look away again.

“If you like.”

He loves it.

**Author's Note:**

> n.b. I don't actually know anything about plants why did I do this to myself
> 
> ofc Crowley eventually gets really into gardening too but as a big fan of the "Crowley is using his plants to reenact the trauma of his being cast out by God" meta I reckoned he'd probably be very stubborn about being Too Cool for being nice to plants


End file.
